Suggestion: A REAL Commons

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Greetings from the German MA,

as you all know other language editions of the Memory Alpha are able to use your pool of media files as a commons. That sure is a great idea and I don't want to offend you - but we might have a problem with relying just on your decisions whether an uploaded image is about to delete or not ignoring the fact that it might be used in one of the other language versions - as it was done here. We use(d) that image in the German article "Arrestzelle" (brig in the MA/en) and haven't found any replacement yet.

I really don't want to make you look on every picture if it's used somewhere else in MA/ALL and give those language editions a call that the image is about to be deleted - even if we had such a specific tool as Duesentrieb'sGallery-Tool used within the "Wikipedia complex". So I came up with the idea of a real MA/commons - don't you think that might be better for all of us in the very end? : [defchris] :: [ talk ] : 19:42, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Any comments? I understand, that this issue doesn't bother you much, but it is an important problem for the other language versions. In the moment, MA exists in 14 different versions, and all versions would benefit from a commons. I support a real commons for all the MAs.But if there is no interest in this, I would come up with another suggestion to solve this problem. We should create a page Memory Alpha:Shared images/German (and other pages for the other versions), were we will put all the images we use at the MA/de. When a image is suggested for deletion, your admins would see this and could inform us on a special page created in MA/de. This would solve the problem for us, but cause more work for you. Again, a commons is a better idea.--Bravomike 16:00, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, I don't quite see the benefit for MA/en in doing so. We've got a very strict upload policy, compared to some of the "minor" language versions, and most probably have the biggest image archive of all MA versions anyway. Copying our image archive to an international commons wouldn't help us, moving would mean that we'd lose some of the control we now have - unless the new commons would be under our control, in which case, there wouldn't be much difference to the status now.

The image link page might be an option, although I'm not sure how well this will be accepted by the admins around here (who basically will have more work to do for something that "only" helps other language versions).

An alternative to that would be a gallery page on MA/de itself. If you are adding a category tag to your image description page of a shared image, that image should show up in the category while it exists, and be a blank space if it has been deleted (in theory, at least - would need to be checked if it really works that way). That way, you could locally check whether shared images you use still exist, or need to be uploaded locally.

All that aside, a "true commons" would be something that Wikia would need to work out, and I don't know if that will happen in the near future. -- Cid Highwind 17:11, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

see de:Kategorie:Bild (MA/en), a category for all used shared images was the first thing we established, it existed even before the first shared image was used. But in the moment there are more than 200 images, and it will be more in future, which means, that this category is no effective way of controlling the status of the images. Anyway, the problem ist not to see when a image got deleted, we want to see when its suggested for deletion.

I don't know all your upload rules, but to be honest I'm pretty sure, that German policy is at least as strict as yours, if not stricter in many points (e.g. format, title, quality). So if a commons will be created, its rules have to meet a standard all MA versions can accept, and I'm sure that MA/de will also have to accept a lot of compromises.

After all, I still believe that creating a commons is quite unavoidable. As I mentioned above, there a 14 wikis, that all use the same images. All MA versions use images from the same episodes of the same shows and the same movies. In fact, before this shared-images-feature was given, a lot of images in MA/de were taken from MA/en. A commons seems like a natural devolepment to me.

So what about this: You thought of two possibilities for creating a commons: copying or moving your database. But we could also think about only creating a commons with a new, empty database we will fill. You would keep your images and nobody would force you to use the commons. But it would mean, that we would no longer bother you with our problems, an if you want to use the commons you could do so.--Bravomike 19:06, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

If image reuse means that much trouble, you should consider whether you really want to continue it. According to your suggestion, to reuse an MA/en image on MA/de, you would need to 1. create a separate description page, 2. manually add it to a category/gallery here, 3. regularly check whether the image here has changed to something you don't want on MA/de, 4. have admins here deal with possible reuse before an image gets deleted. That's much trouble to avoid issues that no one has complained about, yet (namely, the size of our image databases combined), and the cost-benefit-ratio for this probably wouldn't look too good. ;) ...but, that's your choice.

Regarding the alternative, a "real commons", I'm not sure that starting with an empty one would make any sense. Most users would obviously still upload to the language version they are actively editing, so we'd need to set up a team that does nothing but fill the commons with images and make sure they are used instead of "local" copies - and all that for 14 communities that are explicitely stated to be "free to do whatever they like to do". -- Cid Highwind 11:39, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

You are perfectly right, the cost-benefit-ratio is suboptimal, but there are several reasons for using this feature anyway. For example, IP users are not allowed to upload images, so a lot of IP users use shared images, what we can't avoid. It's also silly to upload exactly the same image to our database when we can use it without doing so, too. In the end, I still belive that a real commons for MA would be something all ould benefit from, but I understand that this is something that is not your problem, and bothering you with this issue is not necessary.--Bravomike 19:44, 26 February 2008 (UTC)